Political disunion—sovereign authority within the city walls—thus formed a settled maxim in the Greek mind. The relation between one city and another was an international relation, not a relation subsisting between members of a common political aggregate. Within a few miles from his own city-walls, an Athenian found himself in the territory of another city, wherein he was nothing more than an alien,—where he could not acquire property in house or land, nor contract a legal marriage with any native woman, nor sue for legal protection against injury, except through the mediation of some friendly citizen. The right of intermarriage, and of acquiring landed property, was occasionally granted by a city to some individual non-freeman, as matter of special favor, and sometimes (though very rarely) reciprocated generally between two separate cities.[411] But the obligations between one city and another, or between the citizen of the one and the citizen of the other, are all matters of special covenant, agreed to by the sovereign authority in each. Such coexistence of entire political severance with so much fellowship in other ways, is perplexing in modern ideas, and modern language is not well furnished with expressions to describe Greek political phenomena. We may say that an Athenian citizen was an _alien_ when he arrived as a visitor in Corinth, but we can hardly say that he was a _foreigner_; and though the relations between Corinth and Athens were in principle _international_, yet that word would be obviously unsuitable to the numerous petty autonomies of Hellas, besides that we require it for describing the relations of Hellenes generally with Persians or Carthaginians. We are compelled to use a word such as _interpolitical_, to describe the transactions between separate Greek cities, so numerous in the course of this history. [411] Aristot. Polit. iii. 6, 12. It is unnecessary to refer to the many inscriptions which confer upon some individual non-freeman the right of ἐπιγαμία and ἔγκτησις.